That moment when you discover that there was more than one cup of coffee left in the pot because the excess is spreading across the counter and burning your fingers. I usually write my Thomas Aquinas pieces a couple of days in advance, but between family vacation and catching a cold it didn’t happen. (Really, the vacation would have been sufficient. The cold is just gravy.) I hope to do better by next Monday. Read more
In chapter 3 of Lumen Fidei, Pope Francis is talking about the role of the sacraments in the life of faith. In paragraphs 41 through 43, he talks specifically about the sacrament of baptism, and makes several salient points. First, baptism is a communal thing: it is how the faith is passed on: Baptism makes us see, then, that faith is not the achievement of isolated individuals; it is not an act which someone can perform on his own, but... Read more
See the previous installment here. It’s a big part of the philosophy of Clojure programming that you keep mutable state (data that can change) separate from immutable state (data that cannot change). There are a number of good reasons for doing this; the one that the Clojure books usually trot out is that it makes supporting concurrency easier because you don’t need to synchronize reads and writes to data that never changes. Concurrency isn’t all that important to a single-user... Read more
Because I enjoyed it so much last week, here’s another track from Hugh Laurie’s album Let Them Talk: “The Battle of Jericho”. Give it a little bit; it starts slow and then builds. Read more
After we do the washing-up, I get to spend the rest of the evening reading FAQs on cat maintenance on the web. It takes about half an hour to come to the unwelcome realization that they’re almost as complex as home-brew gaming PCs, and have even more failure modes. (When your gaming PC malfunctions it doesn’t stealthily dump core in your shoes.) — Charles Stross, The Rhesus Chart Bob Howard, computer geek, comes to terms with owning a cat. Read more
I once knew a lady who house-trained poodles for poodle skirts. It’s a harder job than you might think, house-training a dog who’s going to be hanging on to a skirt for dear life at sock hops and the like, but she was good at it. She took her poodles to competitions and won many prizes. In the end, though, her career ended in sadness. She’d been training a truly promising poodle, almost completely flat from side-to-side, with excellent gripping... Read more
The Rhesus Chart, Charles Stross’ latest outing in “The Laundry Files”, came out on the 1st of July, and I’d devoured it by midnight on the 3rd. Here’s the background, if you’re not a hopeless computer/Lovecraft geek. Bob Howard, once a budding British maths student, is now an employee of a shadowy British secret service office called “The Laundry”, whose task it is to preserve the British public from having their minds and other body parts devoured by Lovecraftian horrors... Read more
It’s summer time, and I’m busy with family things. Thomas Aquinas will return in a week or two. We hear a lot about the “Cloud” these days, and I suspect many readers have only a cloudy idea of what the Cloud is. What the Cloud is, is computer hardware that you don’t own that you access over the ‘net to do things and store your stuff. The Cloud is incredibly useful; it’s a treat to be able to move from... Read more
In paragraph 40 of Lumen Fidei, Pope Francis repeats something that cannot be too often said: that Christian faith is not simply assent to a doctrine, but rather knowledge of and trust in the Living God. Faith, in fact, needs a setting in which it can be witnessed to and communicated, a means which is suitable and proportionate to what is communicated. For transmitting a purely doctrinal content, an idea might suffice, or perhaps a book, or the repetition of... Read more
So I’m, in a rather desultory fashion, putting together a simple text adventure in the Clojure programming language. (You can find the code at GitHub, should you be interested.) The first thing you need in a text adventure game is a world to move around in. The world usually consists of a collection of rooms. Each room can have any number of links to other rooms; each link is in a particular direction. Directions include the four cardinal directions (north,... Read more
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